


Slow Dance

by zenonaa



Category: Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
Genre: Child Abuse, F/M, Happy Ending, Misgendering, Multi, Other, Trans Female Character, full class ensemble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 14:29:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13078836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenonaa/pseuds/zenonaa
Summary: "She didn’t write from her pain, though she thought she did, but from the strength that she didn’t know she had that endured this pain. When she wrote, she could be anyone, in any life she chose, and she could be herself, finally."Fukawa didn't have an easy childhood.





	Slow Dance

****The growth rings on the old, weather-worn plank fencing stared at Touko, millions of eyes trained on the stature that she had accumulated so far in her five years of living outside of her mother’s body, whichever woman that was. She tugged up her backpack straps and then wiggled open the front gate to her garden. Immediately, she had to fight against the pressure working against her. Exertion lit up her face in blotched red as she pushed, pushed, pushed.

When she created a small enough gap, she seized the opportunity and squeezed through, careful not to scrape herself. The sight of blood always made her feel funny. In front of the gate, their refuse bin had tipped over and fallen against it, not necessarily by accident. Touko adjusted her circular glasses, scrambled over the bin and progressed up the path. Strewn across the overgrown grass were bricks, food containers and an old shed full of junk that Touko hadn’t seen but could assume.

At the door of the house, she paused and cast her eyes to the side. Her neighbour’s garden was green and neatly trimmed. They used to own cats, and a dog, but now they had white birds with mohawks. Touko didn’t know what they thought of her house, and they never asked. No one ever did.

She dragged a nearby brick over, fished out the key on her necklace hidden under her navy coat, and stood on the brick so she could reach to unlock the door.

In the hallway, more trash lay ahead for her to pick her way through.

“Shut the damn door,” yelled a mother’s voice from the direction of the living room.

Touko did so, and afterwards, she headed to the kitchen to see what food she could scavenge. Anything in the cabinets on the walls could only be obtained if she climbed onto a counter, but last time, one of her mothers caught Touko up high and tossed her into the closet downstairs for behaving like an animal.

Staying as close to the safe side as one could in this household, she checked the fridge. There, she found some cheese, a tomato and a carrot.

The cheese could be eaten with the slice of bread that she traded for at lunch, in exchange for a paper fortune teller that she dutifully made for a cherub-faced girl. She carried her findings up the stairs, tiptoeing so the stairs creaked as little as possible, and entered her room.

“How are you today?” Touko asked her pet stinkbug, Kameko, who answered with a tiny buzzing click. Smiling, she put the cheese and the carrot on her bed, placing the tomato in the plastic tub that Kameko lived in.

Something yellow caught Touko’s attention. Her hand hovered over a sticky note next to Kameko, which on further inspection, said “Hirohiro” and was accompanied by a drawing of a stick person with a jagged heart around them. Sometimes, Touko slept walked, and left similar notes, so thinking not much of it, Touko scrunched up the note, threw it at her overthrowing waste basket and peeled off her backpack. It sank a bit into her mattress as she set it down. She undressed, taking off her coat, shoes, polo-shirt and shorts in that order, and redressed in an old vest top that one of her mothers threw away.

Unzipping her backpack revealed Touko’s after-school snack and possibly her dinner, among other things. From that pocket, she got out the plastic bag that she had kept her piece of bread in. As well as the bag, there was a bottle of clean water. Using the plastic bag as a tablecloth of sorts, she lay down on it the bottle, the piece of bread, the cheese and the carrot. Combining the cheese with the bread, she created a sandwich, and she ate it slowly and quietly.

After she finished the sandwich, she allowed herself two gulps of water. She left the carrot alone for now and breathing loudly, she reached into her backpack and got out a catalog that she found in a trashcan on the way home. Some of the pages were crumpled, stained or both, remaining wrinkled even after she attempted to flatten them, but they sufficed.

Touko draped herself over the edge of her bed. From underneath her sunken bed, its wooden support planks either askew, one or two ends completely out of slot or in one case, snapped, she pulled out a shoebox. The bed groaned as she sat back up, legs crossed.

She placed the box onto her legs, cradling it like she was its nest, and took off the lid. In the box were a pair of plastic safety scissors and cut-outs of people from magazine pages, once glossy but now faded by the rubbing of fingers dirtied by an infant’s day.

Handling them with great care, Touko laid out the family of cut-out people onto the bed. In total, there were four members. The family consisted of a smiling mother, father and two daughters. There was an older sister called Touko and a younger one called Natsuki, both wearing floral dresses stuck on with blu tac. Touko decided to give the family not only a more extensive wardrobe but neighbours too, and flipped through the catalog for suitable candidates. Every time she found people that she wanted to include or an outfit with potential, she tore a bit of plastic bag and tucked it between the pages as a bookmark.

When she arrived at the back of the catalog, several tufts poked out. She went through the catalog again, but this time, she carefully cut out what had caught her eye before, and she ended up with several new outfits and another family.

“Good evening, Shiike-san,” mumbled Touko, one finger pressed against the mother of the new neighbours. She wiggled her digit as she spoke on behalf of the paper doll. “I am Minami-san.”

Now Shiike-san twitched.

“Ah, hello. Welcome to your new home,” said Touko in a slightly lower pitch. “I have two daughters. They can meet your children now.”

Shiike-san and Suzuki-san lay together off to the side with the fathers so the children paper dolls could take up the centre stage. Natsuki and the small Touko stayed together while nearby were a son and a daughter.

“What’s your name?” Touko had Natsuki ask.

“I am Manami Minami and this is my brother, Hiroto,” replied the new family’s daughter with a different inflection. “I want to be your friend. Let’s play games together.”

Touko gave all the children a finger so she could move them up and down as they jumped. Their backs didn’t depart from the bed, but they slid across the surface, and from where she looked down on them, they looked like they were jumping.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said, and it became a mantra.

Keeping pressure on the dolls, she shifted them slowly, aimlessly. Her mutterings tripped up her tongue several times as the paper dolls conversed, talking about how happy they were, how they would stay friends and share food and toys, and how they would have sleepovers and hug and comfort each other and listen.

Then the front door slammed.

She jerked her head up and froze. The sky had shut its eyes and brought down night time, its transition having gone unnoticed by Touko until now.

Though she had been introduced to the concept of time at kindergarten, Touko didn’t know how to tell its number, but she understood darkness and what it precluded. That much had been taught to her, with bruises, by spells in the closet and the basement, and she learned from something else. Something secret. Someone.

Her breathing slowed, labouring, while her heart raced. Downstairs, her father shouted, and she listened in a daze to the noise, not the words, breaking out of her stupor when the shouting stopped and the stairs quaked as he stomped up them. Touko grabbed the paper dolls and stuffed them into her box, but the door to her room swung open before she could hide the box under her bed.

“‘Thought your lights were on,” he said.

Sorry.

“What were you doing?” he asked.

Nothing. Sorry.

He trudged over and snatched the box from her.

“What the hell is this?” Spit sprayed out of his mouth.

Sorry, sorry, sorry. A new mantra.

“I’m talking to you,” he snarled.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Her father shoved his hand into the box and once he had a hold of its contents, he hurled the box off to the side. It thumped against the floor, landing near a wall, and it didn’t strike the carpet particularly loudly but the noise almost made Touko vomit out her heart. She watched him, throat tight. He stared back as he ripped up the paper dolls, the Minamis and the Shiikes, and all the outfits that she pored over.

Shreds of paper corpses fluttered to the carpet crusty with dust, dirt and glass.

“You’ll end up soft in the head if you play with dolls like a girl,” said Touko’s father, leering, in the same tone of voice he used when issuing a warning.

Touko squeezed her knees, holding her breath, biting the inside of her cheeks. His flinty eyes drilled into her, filling Touko’s head with a buzz. He leaned toward her, extending an arm, and she choked, tensing all over, but he didn’t reach for her, hand veering to the side of her. Rustling hinted of what he did, and when he straightened, the sight of the catalog in his hands served as confirmation.

Without a word, he left the room, throwing the door shut behind him. Her ears rang.

She counted as high as she could, to thirty-nine, kicking her legs gently. Breathing still proved a struggle, but by the time she finished counting, she managed.

* * *

 

The next day, in kindergarten, during playtime, Touko tugged on the skirt of her teacher.

“You want to make paper dolls?” Ishizaka-sensei asked, after Touko explained what she sought. Her eyes narrowed. “Wouldn’t you rather play cars?”

“No,” Touko simply said.

“Well, okay,” said Ishizaka with a small smile, and she took Touko’s hand and led her over to a table.

Ishizaka sat Touko down on a plastic chair and fetched several pieces of paper from a bright red tray in a storage unit, the other trays different colours of the rainbow. She walked back and crouched by the table.

“There are two ways to make them. You can draw them holding hands in a line and cut them out, or if you’re clever enough, you can do a trick,” said Ishizaka.

The trick involved folding a long piece of paper in half several times. Ishizaka unfolded it and when she refolded it, she used the pre-existing creases as a guide rather than folding it exactly like before, alternating the direction, so at the end, the strip of paper looked like the pleats on the skirts that the other girls in Touko’s class wore.

“It’s called an accordion fold,” said Ishizaka, using a very big word, but Touko remembered seeing it on a page about a music room in a picture book so she knew what she meant.

She compressed the strip of paper so all the panels were lined up in a stack. At the top, the folded edge was on the left side, and Ishizaka drew half of a person on this side, with their arm extending to the right side. Pinching the paper firmly in one hand, Ishizaka’s other hand cut along the outline with some silver scissors.

The last fragment of paper fell and Ishizaka opened up the accordion folds. Eight paper people, holding hands in a line, hung from her fingertips like a washing line.

“Now you can draw on them and make them look however you want,” said Ishizaka, and she handed over custody of the paper dolls to Touko.

Touko nodded and set the chain down. She grabbed some colouring pencils from the silver tin on the table and scratched black hair onto the one furthest on the left. Her tongue peeped out from her lips as she focused, drawing internal features onto the face next, circle eyes with dots and a horizontal line for the mouth.

Ishizaka stood up. “If you need me for anything else, just say.”

Despite her parting words, Ishizaka lingered, but activity across the room attracted her attention, and she strode off, close to a run.

“Put your pants on, Shin-chan!” Ishizaka yelped, and she staggered into the haze that developed around Touko’s table, that only Touko couldn’t see through.

Some time later, all the paper dolls had hair and faces. They shared the same neutral line for a mouth but depending on how she looked at them, how she perceived them, any one of them could smile, or bite their lips, and they could peer back at her with a sheen in their eyes or with a dull gaze while their companions glinted with different emotions. And if they ever got broken again, she could easily remake them, unlike her previous paper dolls.

Touko averted her eyes briefly and spotted the scissors that Ishizaka had left behind. The only scissors that Touko and the other children were allowed to use were made of plastic and couldn’t cut through anything stronger than paper. These scissors, however, were metal. She poked her fingers through the gaping loops and holding her breath, snipped through the hands connecting the fourth paper person to the fifth one.

Now, there were two families of four.

A quick glance around informed Touko that everyone else was distracted. Touko hurried to the cloakroom and headed over to her cubbyhole so she could hide the scissors and her paper dolls in her backpack. Her hands fumbled with the zip, but she got it open and thrust the scissors in, shutting the pocket after and holding the paper dolls for a little longer to admire them some more.

“Ichirou-kun!” came a voice behind her, but Touko didn’t react until a hand grabbed her shoulder. She shoved her backpack and the paper dolls as far back as she could before spinning around, hands behind her back.

Opposite Touko was one of the girls in her class. Her ginger pigtails bobbed as she spoke to Touko.

“We need you to play Real House,” said the girl, Nene, fists pressed against her hips. “You can be Hiroto-kun’s wife, cheating on my husband and holding his baby in your tummy. None of the other boys want to play a girl, and you’ve got the longest hair, so you’ve gotta. So you can play, as long as you don’t make any weird faces or chase us around.”

The weird faces and chasing remark, Touko didn’t understand, but she didn’t care to understand. Normally, when another child approached Touko with this sort of request, Touko would hiss and glare and make herself undesirable, and then hide somewhere so she couldn’t be bothered again, but she hesitated, fidgeting, eyeing Nene’s chubby cheeks and tight brow.

“H-Hiroto-kun’s playing?” asked Touko, feeling her mouth try to smile.

Nene huffed. “Yeah! Now, come on.”

She grabbed Touko’s hand and tugged.

“Can I choose my name?” asked Touko.

“I’m just going to call you a slut but yeah, all right,” said Nene, leading Touko back to the play area.

All the houses that Touko knew had walls on every side, but here, it was open plan with just two perpendicular walls, them being the corner of the classroom. A large, green, rectangular rug made up most of the flooring of the pretend house. On the rug were two clear boxes of toys and three pastel chairs seating plastic babies. Nearby, on wooden flooring, was a table flanked by high chairs holding more babies, and next to them was an ironing board and a few cribs, downsized so that children could utilise them for play.

Everyone else who would be involved in the game had already gathered on the rug, including Hiroto, who made Touko’s heart flutter just by looking at her.

“So what’s your name gonna be?” Nene asked.

Touko found her voice again, clenched her fists and said, “Touko.”

* * *

 

“Hey, everybody!” crowed one of Touko’s classmates, pointing at the noticeboard in their homeroom. “Check out what Fukawa-kun wrote to Minami-kun!”

Chairs creaked as thirty-six elementary school students either swiveled around or got up and advanced toward the noticeboard.

The thirty-seventh student, Touko, stayed at her desk, unable to move.

“Dear Hiroto-kun,” drawled the girl who had called for everyone’s attention, reading aloud the letter on full display. “Although we have known each other since we were in Kindergarten, the seed of our bond only began to take root when we started elementary school together. Over the seasons, my feelings for you have bloomed. In the coldest weather, my love for you has kept me from withering away, and when you are in Shikoku, my memories of our time together will provide me with an inner warmth that not even arctic temperatures could overwhelm, and a light that will help me grow without your smile physically there to shine on me.”

Laughter rumbled, and the girl hadn’t even finished yet. She raised her voice so all could hear.

“My rose petal lips long for yours. I will miss you, but my love burns so bright that I am sure we will meet again. Yours forever, Touko Fukawa.”

More laughter pealed around the room.

“He must have stayed behind yesterday to put it up,” mused another student with mirth.

While some members of the class reread the letter, and some dawdled over to see it for themselves, others drifted over to Touko’s desk, where she sat hunched, hands buried in her shoulder-length hair. The classroom floor tried to swallow Touko, or rather, she willed it to swallow her. However, though her body clenched, she remained upright in the folds of its palm, and her classmates loomed over her, waggling fingers, clawed and cutting, screeches in her ears like nails down a blackboard.

“Is that your nickname?” asked a boy with a fanged grin, just one of the shadowy figures swirling around her. “Touko?”

No, it was her name.

“Yeah, it is,” said Nene.

“Fukawa-kun loves Minami-kun!” a different girl chimed, eyes just as dark as the rest. The class joined in, singing in delight at what seemed like a novelty to them.

Touko scrunched her eyes shut, trembling, but their faces burned into her eyelids, blotches like she stared at the Sun for too long.

“He’s gonna cry!” someone, anyone, said. It could have been anyone.

Go away. Stop talking. Stop staring. Stop laughing. Stop laughing.

“What’s going on?” cracked a mature voice that dampened the children’s noise. It belonged to their teacher, who must have just arrived.

“It’s Fukawa-kun. He wrote a love letter for Minami-kun,” a girl explained.

Silence descended as everyone waited for their teacher’s verdict. Touko peeked, lifting her head a fraction. Her vision wobbled a little but otherwise the classroom had returned to normal. Sasaki-sensei walked over to the noticeboard and read the letter quickly. She furrowed her brow, pulled out the pin, minimising the damage done to the letter, and took the letter with her to the front of the classroom.

“This morning, we’re going to be learning how to divide fractions,” she said, and she slotted Touko’s letter into the drawer in her desk. “Please sit down. Pen and paper, everyone.”

Eventually, the class settled, and their smirks either became smiles or were tucked into their mouths in concentration. Touko spent the next period staring down at a blank piece of paper, not bothering to hold her pen and pretend that she planned to write something. Every snicker seemed directed at her and every glance grazed her skin, striking her cheek like when she cried too loudly in her bedroom.

Sasaki didn’t call on or engage Touko. Lunch time rolled by, and previously appointed members of the class left for the school kitchen, returning shortly with a trolley and now decked in white. They wore white aprons, white masks and white caps. The other children pushed their desks together to form clusters that could be sat around. With their seating arrangements sorted, they lined up in single file to be served their lunches.

Touko remained seated and busied her hands and eyes with a copy of The Secret Garden. Her throat prickled, aching, and the words in her book cramped together, but she persevered. Hearing footsteps, she tensed, and she tried to slap on an impassive mask onto her face.

“You have a real talent for writing.” Sasaki had sauntered over to Touko’s desk and stooped down. She placed Touko’s letter down in front of her. “This was beautiful. You’re such a sensitive, talented boy.”

Girl. But the lump in Touko’s throat blocked her correction.

“I think you should write to Minami-kun and tell him how you feel,” Sasaki carried on. “I’ll contact his new school and get his address for you. And even if you don’t send him a letter, just writing out your feelings might help make you feel better.”

Sasaki hesitated. She lowered her voice.

“And, Fukawa-kun, if you want the teasing to stop, you should consider behaving more like the other boys,” said Sasaki. “Then they won’t have anything to make fun of. Crew cuts are pretty fashionable right now.”

Touko’s lips thinned.

* * *

 

“What are you, a baby?”

The slap sent Touko reeling. Her legs buckled beneath her and she slumped to the floor, landing near her bed. Sobs clawed at her ravaged throat and she strained her eyes, unable to see much as the impact had thrown off her glasses.

One of Touko’s mothers stood over her. She fisted Touko’s hair and dragged Touko out through the door and across the landing, to the top of the stairs.

Behind the door of the parents’ bedroom, a beat thumped, backed up by squeaks of the bed.

“Answer me, you piece of crap. Only babies wet themselves,” said the mother with Touko, not the one in the parents’ bedroom with Touko’s father. “Last month, I got a call from your teacher that you were wearing a skirt to school, and now this. You know how to use a toilet. Why did you piss yourself? It’s bad enough that you piss your bed... Now you’re pissing in public too? Are you that much of an attention-seeker?”

Usually, Touko restrained her bladder until she returned home, but she woke up late that day, so she couldn’t go to the toilet before she ran all the way to school, and she drank too much water when she was there, and she couldn’t go to the toilet at school because she wasn’t allowed to use the disabled toilet or the girls’ bathroom. At home, when she wet herself, she could dry her sheets and her panties, but in class, there had been no escape, and she spent the rest of the afternoon crying in the teachers’ room.

She cried all the way to the closet and when her mother shoved her inside, she cried in it too. The door slammed shut, and Touko couldn’t see a single thing.

“You can come out when you’ve dried up,” sneered this mother. “I don’t want you pissing on our floor.”

* * *

 

Touko’s father opened the door three days later.

* * *

 

Alone in her room, curled up on her bed, Touko reread the letter. Not the letter that she wrote to Hiroto a month ago, which she put in his shoe cupboard on his last day of school, but the one she penned over the past several weeks. Thanks to Sasaki-sensei, she had his address, so she could send it to him. Then he would taste the acid that her words oozed, or he would double over at the rhythm each syllable pummeled into him.

Or maybe he wouldn’t bother reading it. The thought wrenched her heart.

Impulsively, she threw the letter, but it didn’t travel far, landing close to her bed. Touko bent over the edge to pick it up, and she caught a glimpse of an old shoebox under her mattress.

Blood rushed to her head. She grabbed the box, remembering the paper dolls and how precious they had been. Now, she couldn’t bear the thought of them, especially the one of Hiroto, and she flung off the lid, intending to destroy them.

Someone beat her to it.

The arms of all the paper dolls had been cut vertically, so none were holding hands. Touko sifted through them for the Hiroto paper doll, and even more bizarrely, found that his head had been sliced off and punctures existed on his wrists and ankles. She picked up the metal scissors in the box, obtained all those years ago, and studied them with a frown.

Another wave of anger washed over her.

“I hate you,” she said. The lid of the shoebox hadn’t gone far, still on the bed, still in reach, and she dragged it back. Laying the lid on her lap, she put the Hiroto paper doll on it, and she started to stab him with the tip of the scissors. Touko’s confessions of hate sizzled on her lips as she attacked Hiroto, again and again and again, progressively harder.

Then she missed. Stabbed her hand. There was blood.

Her vision filled with blood.

* * *

 

Touko awoke, sprawled across the ground. Concrete seemed to push back against her weight. Shaking, she elevated the top half of her body, and then it clicked that there was concrete beneath her in the first place. She whipped her head back and forth, side-to-side, but she couldn’t see much due to how dark it was. The Moon didn’t offer much help. Her head ached and so did her left thigh, but she dismissed this as a result of lying on hard flooring at a weird angle. Against the wishes of her body, she rose, feeling herself rock faintly.

Something fell from her hand, hitting the ground loudly. Touko jumped, adjusted her glasses and crouched down to see what it was. In the poor lighting, she couldn’t tell until after an examination with her sense of touch, and then she realised that they were her scissors. They were wet, but she couldn’t tell with what. A slime of some kind.

The answer to what it was could wait. More importantly, she didn’t know how she got wherever she was. Figuring out her location mattered most. Touko stood up, took a step forward and bumped her foot against something big, heavy but very short.

She sprung back, but whatever it was, it didn’t attack Touko. Her heart pounded, and when she felt sure that it wasn’t alive, she approached it again and tapped her foot against it intentionally. The collision made a thud sound that didn’t echo. With that same foot, she explored the mysterious object with the sole of her shoe, and she realised what it was when she skimmed over a face.

“G-G...” Touko’s legs gave way and she dropped to her knees.

Praying that she was mistaken, she reached forward, but her fingers pressed against unmistakable flesh, kneading cheeks, lips and a nose. Her hand slid around to the side of the head and got tickled by hair. She retracted her arm back, gagging, and lurched into a standing position. With her fingers locked around the scissors, she ran away from the scene, emerging from an alley into a residential street, able to see now due to street lights.

A glance at the scissors showed blood.

Touko’s body teetered, her head spun and her vision freckled, but she stayed conscious. The nightdress she wore that once belonged to one of her mothers didn’t have any pockets, so she hitched it up to tuck the scissors into her panties, but to her surprise, she discovered herself to be wearing a leather pouch on her right thigh.

She dipped a few digits in and probed the pouch. It was long enough to comfortably hold scissors and inside, she found a train ticket bought the day before and her letter to Hiroto, crumpled. While she was prone to sleepwalk, this was too much. Somehow, she lost twenty-four hours.

This had to be a dream. One that she would wake up from soon. Touko put the scissors and the letter into the pouch on her leg, keeping hold of the ticket, and tugged on her hair, distressed. In the meantime, while she waited for herself to wake up, she wandered through different streets. None of the streets were familiar. She might even have revisited a few.

Eventually, Touko sat down by a closed café and curled up, but she didn’t cry.

More time passed.

“Are you okay?” someone asked.

Touko looked up.

A woman stared down at her, eyebrows squished together. She was stout and wore a puffy black coat with a fur trimming.

“Are you lost?” asked the woman, but Touko still didn’t answer. The woman craned her neck. “What’s that in your hand?”

Not waiting for an answer, the woman bent down and uncurled Touko’s fingers. She took the ticket and read it. Her mouth fell open.

“You’re so far from home!” she said. “Did you come here with your parents?”

Touko shook her head.

The woman tilted her head to one side and spoke gentler. “Do you need directions to the train station?”

This time, Touko nodded.

“Here, I’ll take you there,” said the woman. “Your ticket expired but I’ll buy you a single home. It’s no time of night for a young girl to be out by herself.”

She reached for Touko’s hand, and Touko let her take it.

* * *

 

Morning lightened the sky as Touko arrived back in her hometown. During the train ride, she drifted in and out of consciousness, but as she didn’t wake up and escape her dream, she reluctantly accepted that what happened might have been real.

Even if that meant someone potentially died.

But she didn’t kill them. Touko didn’t remember doing that. She didn’t remember going there. The body could have been that of a drunk man. Yes. A drunk man who kidnapped her from her room and passed out before he did secret things to her. He might not even have been dead. Nothing else explained what happened, or could. As for the scissors, she did cut herself on them, so there. Sorted.

Because it was Sunday, Touko didn’t have to worry about school, but her parents would be at home. She steeled herself and opened the front door.

“Shut the damn door,” yelled a mother’s voice from the direction of the living room.

Touko did so and crept over to the stairs, anticipating hands to grab her and throw her into a closet.

“You’re lucky your father has been out,” the mother added. “If he knew you had been gone for so long...”

If he knew, Touko wouldn’t have been the only one in trouble, and so she and the mothers reached a truce. She slunk up the stairs to her room. There, she flopped down on her bed and tried to fall asleep, breathing in the must of her bed covers.

When Touko woke up, or maybe just raised her head, because she didn’t know if she actually slept, she looked out of the window.

Afternoon was in its prime. A groan scratched her throat and she rubbed her eyes. Touko lowered her hands and caught sight of the shoebox, on her bed where she left it. She swatted at it, barely moving it, and then noticed a yellow sticky note.

After some hesitation, she picked the note out of the box.

It said two words.

‘You’re welcome.’

Her stomach lurched. The drunk man must have left it there for her parents. He must have written all the notes that she had found over the years. Touko trembled, fidgeting, and felt crust under her fingernails, which she forced herself to look at.

Dry blood.

She vomited into the shoebox.

* * *

 

Days later, the media blew up about the murder of Hiroto Minami, stabbed to death in an alley. On the third day, unable to sleep with the murder weapon under her bed, Touko buried the scissors in the garden. If anyone wanted to use them again, they would have to get their own, whether they bought them or made them.

Touko had assumed that blackouts like hers were universal and experienced by everyone, or at least most people, from a young age. Sometimes, her mothers would throw her around or lock her away for things she couldn’t remember doing, like screaming, walking around outside and starting fights with teachers and students, and her father would say she did or didn’t do things that she thought the contrary about. Sleepwalking wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. Then there were the handwritten notes that Touko would find and not remember writing, but the way they could talk about Touko’s parents and people from her school, they couldn’t have been written by her father or either of her mothers, yet they couldn’t have been created by anyone outside of the family.

She never answered the notes and gradually, they petered out, but they surged in frequency after Hiroto’s death.

Of everyone she knew, only she went to Hiroto’s funeral. Surrounded by strangers, she dressed in black. Black shoes, black ribbons and a black dress. She wrote a poem, but she didn’t read it aloud. Instead, she sent it anonymously to a newspaper, and they published it, and then the newspaper made an announcement, asking the writer to get in contact with them.

Soon, Touko Fukawa had her own a column, and magazines begged her for her work. When she was ten years old, she published a romance novel, and over the next several years, her novels dominated the romance section in stores, her name, her real name, Touko Fukawa, plastered for all to see. She didn’t write from her pain, though she thought she did, but from the strength that she didn’t know she had that endured this pain. When she wrote, she could be anyone, in any life she chose, and she could be herself, finally.

A range of people sent her fan mail. Aspiring young authors, middle-aged men... However, the person who wrote to her the most was the author of the sticky notes, dubbed by the media as Genocider Syo. The notes appeared in her drafts, her favourite novels, in her shoes, anywhere that Syo thought Touko would look, scrawled messily.

“A thank you will do!”

“Say the word and I’ll kill our father!”

“My favourite colour is red! What’s yours?”

“I like Genocider Syo! I want it on my tombstone!”

Hiroto turned out only to be Syo’s first victim. Touko’s name would top best seller lists while Syo starred as the subject of hundreds of videos, articles and internet forums about unsolved mysteries, dedicated to her, drawing in millions of views. The victims were all men, people who could have become the next Hiroto or her father, and unbeknownst to the public, all were killed with scissors that Touko couldn’t throw away in case they got traced back to her, and besides, Syo would just make more, and Syo used these scissors to carve a tally into her left thigh.

Showers had been hard enough to take.

When Touko applied for high school, she chose Riverbank Girls High School, a long distance away from where she lived. She had to get a diagnosis before they would accept her, and she fought for it, and she got it. With her earnings, she fled to a new residence near the school, and she cut off ties with her parents as much as she could. They finally discovered her double life as a famous author, but bribing them with cheques, they demanded more money, and once satisfied with the amount, they consented. She wore a long skirt everyday, people called her by her real name, she continued to grow out her hair and styled them into two braids, but she never felt accepted, just tolerated.

Then, one day, she was scouted by Hope’s Peak Academy.

* * *

 

Touko shuffled parallel to one of the many bookcases in Hope’s Peak’s library, gliding the tip of her index finger across spines of books. Of all the libraries that she had visited in her life so far, all paled in comparison to this place, with several floors brimming with knowledge and pocket universes confined in paper. Its pleasant earthy scent calmed her, and she was so focused on finding a particular author that she walked right into someone.

“W-Watch it!” Touko hissed, stumbling back. When she regained her footing, she met the eyes of the person she bumped into, though their identity did nothing to lessen her annoyance.

One of her classmates, Byakuya Togami, glared down at her. Byakuya attended the school under the title ‘Super High School Level Heir’. Everyone had a title, including her. His slim frame towered over Touko, and his face gave a twitch of irritation before he spoke to her.

“I was standing still. You’re the one at fault,” he replied coldly. He blinked, and continued staring at her after. “You sit behind me in class. You’re Touko Fukawa, the literary girl, correct?”

“That’s right,” replied Touko, averting her gaze.

She waited for him to go away.

“Tell me, do you only read romance novels?” he asked.

Touko clasped her hands together and looked back at him, nostrils flaring. “I read a wide range of novels. J-Just because I usually write romance, doesn’t mean I’m not well-rounded. It’s just romance is my preferred genre.”

His eyebrows raised a bit.

“In that case, recommend me a thriller,” he said. He prodded up his white frame glasses. “Something engaging. Can you do that?”

“Of course I can,” she huffed. There was a beat of silence between them. “Have you read Gold Rush?”

“No.”

This book was written by the author that Touko had been seeking out, but she didn’t suggest it just for her own convenience. Someone like him, who read detective novels during lesson breaks, who had been born into safe, comfortable wealth, might appreciate or learn from it. Less than a minute later, with him trailing behind Touko like her shadow, she pulled out the book from a shelf and held it out toward him.

“Here,” she said.

Byakuya took the book from her. He turned on his heel and walked away, leaving her in peace.

A few days later, the buzzer of her dorm room rang. Touko had been at her desk, immersed in her latest project, a novel about a gorgon attending a modern-day high school, and she required several jabs on the button to break her free from the narrative she had woven around herself.

She stomped over to the door, unsure who it could be. So far, attempts at friendship with her consisted of a group of girls, headed by an obnoxious student called Aoi Asahina, trying to coax Touko into going swimming with them, which Touko had outright refused. Another time, a different classmate, Sayaka Maizono, endeavoured to connect with Touko over one of Touko’s books, offering questionable interpretations as bait, but when she offered Touko a makeover, Touko shut the door abruptly.

On this occasion, when she cracked the door open, she was confronted by Byakuya’s clear blue eyes and tight pout.

“What do you want?” she asked, gripping the edge of the door.

“I finished it,” he announced. Touko didn’t understand until he revealed the book that he had been carrying. The one that she recommended to him.

“S-So?” asked Touko. She let go of the door so she could twiddle her thumbs. “It belongs to the library, not me. D-Don’t you know how libraries work?”

He grimaced.

“Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot. It just makes you seem like an idiot. I want to discuss the book with you. That’s all,” he told her.

She drew her elbows closer to her sides and didn’t reply.

“We can talk in the library,” he offered. He flicked his head back. “I’m assuming from your quip that you know what a library is.”

“I do,” she snapped. “But maybe... maybe I don’t want to talk to you.”

In her experience, boys only asked her out for dares. For jokes.

“Whatever.” Byakuya turned around and as he walked off, he waved one hand half-heartedly. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me. Though, I recommend you have a shower first. You stink.”

Touko gritted her teeth but hesitated on calling after him. She had discussed books with other people before. Mostly her own books, but whenever people misunderstood something that she wrote, it grated on her nerves. That among other reasons was why she avoided interviews.

This wouldn’t be about one of her books. And it wouldn’t be a date either.

By now, Byakuya had disappeared from sight. Touko took a deep breath and hurried over to her bathroom to get ready. She would go, if only to humble him.

* * *

 

_“He felt he could pity even the birds that fly in the sky, but in reality, he had never once cried since the age of four. If you were unable to surrender to feelings of impotence, tears would not flow. Tears were just a way of comforting yourself, of wallowing in your own weakness. But whenever Kazuki sensed weakness in himself, he immediately set up a wall of hatred and anger, and he felt sorry for people who couldn’t build their own barriers.”_

Byakuya paused from reading aloud. His eyes flicked upward. Opposite him, Touko held her breath, and the library seemed to as well, even though at this time of night, they were the only two students there. Time had lost relevance. Hours could have passed. Or minutes. Between them, they dissected the book, and in doing so, she felt like she had exposed her pulsating heart to him, but in exchange, she saw a glimpse of light in his eyes and a shadow on his face that she hadn’t noticed prior to now.

“I admit, I didn’t expect you to be a fan of such a dark piece of work,” he said, resting his chin in his hand. A cup almost emptied of coffee was positioned by his elbow. “Does it resonate with you at all?”

“Hm,” went Touko.

He might have smiled. She swore she could see herself reflected in his eyes, and she wondered if he could see himself in hers.

“You are interesting, Touko Fukawa,” he said, face framed by beautiful gold hair.

Every tremor of breath of hers magnified, and the wall around her heart shook.

So was he.

And he was handsome.

Too handsome.

Yet for some reason, Syo didn’t kill him.

Syo didn’t kill anyone after that.

* * *

 

Over the seasons, Touko’s heart bloomed, even as Byakuya retreated into his own company whenever he could help it, with his own barriers around his heart. In December, Hope’s Peak hosted a winter dance. It would take place in the main hall, and Touko wouldn’t have attended had Aoi Asahina, on the morning of it, not wedged her foot into the shrinking gap in Touko’s doorway and said their whole class would be there, including Byakuya.

“T-Togami-kun’s coming?” asked Touko, feeling her mouth try to smile.

Aoi huffed. “Yeah! Now come on.”

She grabbed Touko’s hand and tugged, taking Touko to the dormitory of Junko Enoshima, who boasted the title of ‘Super High School Level Gyaru’.

Within a minute of Aoi pressing the buzzer, Junko flung open the door, and they walked inside, but as Aoi and Touko crossed through the doorway, Touko’s heart started to thrash. Maybe it was the overwhelming smell of flowery perfume, or maybe it was something internal. The end result was that the walls around her tilted, closing in, and everyone’s voices meshed into a discordant mess.

“What’s wrong, Fukawa-chan?” asked Aoi, barely distinguishable and sounding far away.

Sayaka Maizono and another girl, Kyouko Kirigiri, daughter of the headmaster, sat Touko down on Junko’s bed. Some other girls from their class were there, including Sakura Oogami, Aoi’s best friend and the tallest person in their class, and Celestia Ludenberg, a pale girl who wore large clip-on twin-drill pigtails.

Touko stared down with her head propped up in her hands and tilted forward. She didn’t speak as a single syllable could have proved disastrous. Her stomach churned, cramping, but the static in her head thinned with time. On one side of her sat Aoi, and on the other, Kyouko, while the others stood around the bed awkwardly.

“I’ll get her some water,” mumbled Mukuro, Junko’s twin, but Touko didn’t know whether or not she imagined Mukuro saying this or misheard her. Footsteps retreated, presumably Mukuro.

“It’s okay,” Aoi soothed, and she tried to rub her back, but Touko knocked Aoi’s hand off with a spasm. Aoi didn’t try again. “You can go back to your room if you want.”

“Even if I picked out the perfect dress,” groused Junko.

“I’ve seen it. It’s so pretty,” gushed Sayaka. “You’ll be so beautiful in it, Fukawa-san.”

Touko snorted, keeping her head down.

“I can do your makeup,” added Sayaka, her tone still as sweet but more restrained. “I’m an idol, but I don’t always have other people do my own makeup. And we’ll style your hair into a cute bun.”

A door opened and footsteps approached.

“Here,” said Mukuro, but Touko didn’t look up. Kyouko shifted to accept the glass on Touko’s behalf and placed it in Touko’s vision. Touko took it and sipped quietly.

“If you need some space, you can go to the bathroom and get changed in there,” said Kyouko. “Then, when you’re ready, we’ll get to work.” She paused. “This is assuming that you still want to go.”

The angle that Touko held the glass at reduced as her hand slowly lowered.

“If anyone says anything mean about you, or says you’re anything but who you are, me and Sakura-chan will sort them out for you, okay?” said Aoi fiercely. “Just like when our swim teacher tried to make you get changed with the boys. Us women stick together, right?”

Everyone waited for Touko’s verdict.

“I’ll go,” decided Touko, and when she lifted her head, they all beamed.

Junko pulled a wine red dress off one of the racks in her room and passed it to Touko, who carried it into the bathroom. The mirror above the sink showed her reflection. Touko peered at it for a moment and then stripped off.

About five minutes later, Touko emerged into the bedroom, wearing the dress with its scoop neck and elegant train. Her cheeks warmed at their stares and she pursed her lips, unable to reciprocate anyone’s eyes. She fiddled with a loose strand of dark hair, winding it around her finger.

“All right, now it’s time to do your hair!” Junko announced, brandishing a hair brush in one hand and a can of hairspray in the other.

Second thoughts prickled Touko’s face. “B-But what if...?”

Kyouko slunk forward and rested her hand on Touko’s shoulder. She tensed but gave Kyouko a chance to talk.

“We’ll be there to support you,” said Kyouko firmly.

Touko nodded, and when Aoi, who maybe wasn’t as obnoxious as Touko first thought, enveloped her in a hug, Touko didn’t try to wiggle out of it.

* * *

 

The art department had gone wild with the decorations. Shining stars, glittery snowflakes and cotton clouds hung from silver string tied to the ceiling frames in the gymnasium. Below, on floor level, at one side of the room, 3D Christmas trees made of card mingled with cut-outs of houses. Two Victorian lamp posts stood proudly across the room from them, in two adjacent corners of a large, empty space that had been allocated to be used as the dance floor. Cool uplighting tinted the room blue, and an indoor disco ball rotated so white flecks of light flitted and shimmered around the room like the students braving the main dance area.

On the other side of the room to the decorations, Touko stood with her arms wrapped around herself. She had been there for half an hour and had yet to spot Byakuya. Everyone at the edges of the room looked the same in shadow, which didn’t help. Aoi had preoccupied Touko with a dance before progressing onto a more permanent partner, facing Sakura while she waggled her hips to upbeat festive music. Elsewhere on the dance floor, Mukuro fumbled through a foxtrot with Sayaka, unable to meet Sayaka’s patient gaze, though if Mukuro did, whether Sayaka would have been able to maintain it was debatable. Kyouko found a temporary partner in Makoto Naegi, a guy in their class who wore a tuxedo too big for him and who hadn’t improved after his dance with Sayaka. They bumped into each other a few times, but he had the sort of smile that Kyouko seemed to struggle to stay annoyed at, and Makoto gracefully let Kyouko dance with Celes afterwards. He went on to form a couple with the shortest person in their class, Chihiro Fujisaki, who wore a puffy skirt and proved as amateurish as Makoto at dancing.

“They’re all witless,” said Byakuya all of a sudden, who for once had snuck up on Touko rather than the other way around.

Her heart gave a leap.

“Y-Yes,” she agreed, nodding.

“You can tell they’ve never had a dance lesson,” he said.

She loosened her hug on herself and turned to him. His black suit fitted him.

“Have you?” she asked.

“Yes,” he confirmed. He pushed up his glasses. “I have half a mind to show them how it’s done.”

“Why don’t you?” Touko asked.

Byakuya inhaled, but no words came to fruition. His mouth shut and he grabbed her right hand. She gasped but followed him to the border of the dance floor more than happily. He continued to grasp her right hand with his left, and with his free hand, he plucked her limp left hand and placed it on his shoulder before holding onto her hip.

What he had said implied that he had some experience in dancing, but they just swayed slightly as they drifted in a circle. Touko didn’t mind though. At all. The next song to play was by an English-American band, slow, twanging, and somewhat eerie, singing about two thousand miles.

“Togami-kun?” said Touko after a while.

He didn’t look at her but he squeezed her hand. Her heart jolted.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Are you... okay with this?”

“What? Do you mean with dancing?”

“Me. Us.”

“We’re dancing, not getting married,” he said. Her heart sank. He met her eyes, sighed, and added, “Listen. After this is over, I want to tell you about someone called Polaris.”

“W-Who...?”

“I am her, but I’m also Byakuya. It depends on my gender, which fluctuates. My father and his associates were keen for me to repress presenting as anything but masculine, but now that I have gained a lot of influence in the Conglomerate... and realised that it was not a phase like they claimed... that can change.”

She widened her eyes.

“You would look good in a dress,” she told him.

This time, he definitely smiled.

“I know. But as I previously stated, I will tell you about it later,” he said. “For now, focus on not stepping on my feet.”

“R-Right,” murmured Touko, and for the next hour, the rest of the world faded away.

**Author's Note:**

> commission from tumblr. i donated what i earned from this to a trans woman who really could do with the money more than i do.


End file.
